Why your social media efforts will fail

Posted by Jeremy L. Knauff | March 2nd, 2010

Despite your best efforts, long hours and plenty of blood, sweat and tears, your social media efforts will most likely fail. Miserably.

Why? It’s about your intentions. More specifically, how your intentions are perceived.

You may have the best damn blanket in the world and want to tell the world about it. After all, once they know about it, they’ll surely want one. Or maybe ten! And obviously, they’ll be overjoyed that you’re blasting them on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn with a steady stream of messages about how they can buy your amazing blanket, right?

No. You’re only going to piss them off and you will lose followers faster than you can say “tweet” if you start blasting them with your sales message. Instead, focus on adding value. Share information your followers can use,…

Is social media killing your SEO campaign?

Posted by Jeremy L. Knauff | October 8th, 2009

As social media continues to grow, it’s taking an increasing toll on your SEO efforts. The days of bloggers happily linking to relevant or interesting content are quickly disappearing, replaced instead by a snippet of text (lately, in 140 character increments) and a shortened, nofollowed link that’s all but worthless from a search engine optimization perspective.

But is it really the rise of social media, as some “so-called” SEO experts claim, that’s making it tougher to build quality links that corrolate to organic ranking, or is it something else?

The truth is, it’s a bit of both. Most social media channels, such as Facebook or Twitter, use a link shortening service and/or add the nofollow attribute to external links. This negates most, if not all of the potential SEO benefits of that link. But most people are using social media poorly anyway – you should be using…